I've had one for the past four years now. I'm an active climber and sailor, and never once has it interfered in my day to day life. The benefits include being able to sort of feel your way around the equipotential lines of an alternating magnetic field. The worst thing that has happened to me was about two weeks into having the implant, I brought my finger to close to a strong magnet used in a menu to stick it to the wall. The magnet in my finger(which is shaped like a small tic-tac) did a 180 under my skin. Ouch.
Minor correction: Predators like lions have no problem distinguishing individual members of a herd. The stripes pattern messes with the way blood-sucking, disease-spreading flies (such as horse flies or tsetse flies) see the world.
Pretty sure that if you read a little further, you will find that the author decided to NOT go with the TOS violating process, and instead used an official MTA API.
Go to jail? I think that is a little bit harsh considering the crimes committed. When will America stop being so damn protestant when it comes to punishment?
Given that I'm actually in the former camp due to my love of travel, the way you phrased this is pretty condescending to people who hate spending money on concerts, hotels, airlines, etc.
Additionally, many people who like to buy 'things' are getting them for the experiences they provide. For example, it's hard to argue that someone who buys a VR system or a hot tub isn't getting 'experiences' when they use them with family and friends.
Just something to consider if you ever use this to berate people too 'materialistic' for your tastes.
I'm not passing any judgement or condemnation. Everyone is allowed spend their money as they like, as well as value what they like. I was more aggravated by the tone of your final two questions "What more do you think this world has to offer you? Do you want servants?" As if one's desire to discover the amazing things our world has to offer is a bad thing...
My experience (in the US, for context) over the past few years is that valued judgement and condescension are far more common than they used to be, so GP may be more inclined to interpret things that way.
I think you are missing the point. It isn't that business travelers need their laptops during the flight, but that most don't check any luggage at all. When I was flying for business, I only traveled with hand luggage. No need to deal with the hassle of checking a bag, when all my clothes for the next few days can fit into a carry on bag.
I have to say, you are really over exaggerating. Gun violence is just not a reality you have to be worried about here. Amsterdam is nothing like any US city where I've lived(in terms of violence on a daily basis), and The Netherlands as a whole is extremely safe.
Here you can see the gun death rate in The Netherlands per 100k inhabitants is 0.58, but there's some areas in the US where the rate is quite comparable.
What really sets things apart is the suicide rate, most deaths by guns in the US are by suicide, but there's counties in the US where there's easy access to guns and the overall death rate is lower than the Dutch gun violence + non-gun suicides.
So in a lot of cases it's not that just having guns makes everything hyper-violent. It's just that if people feel like killing themselves they'll use the best available instrument available to them.
Conflating that with general gun safety as it pertains to you feeling safe walking around Amsterdam, but not in a comparable town in the US, is silly.
I'm sorry, but the lowest group for that US graphic you linked is higher than the number of the Netherlands (0.58 gun deaths, 0.29 of which are homicides, both per 100k). The lowest groups are 2-7 and 0.5-1.4, respectively, both of which are significantly higher than the value for the Netherlands. In fact, your link shows the exact opposite of what you claim: there isn't a single county in the US that has lower gun death or gun homicide ratio than the entirety of the Netherlands. That's an exaggeration, too (there isn't data for all counties), but it doesn't diminish the point that you're by far less likely to get shot in the Netherlands than in a comparable US city.
You're misreading the graph[1]. The 2-7 grouping is all gun deaths, homicides, suicides, and accidental deaths.
If you hover over individual blue counties you can see the breakdown by homicide and suicide rate for some of them.
E.g. Washington, NY has a gun homicide rate of 0.46, gun suicide rate of 5.14. Meanwhile The Netherlands has a gun homicide rate of 0.29, gun suicide rate of 0.28, but an overall homicide rate of 0.7[2], and an overall suicide rate of 8.2, while the US has a suicide rate of 12.1.
Does The Netherlands still come out better? Am I cherry-picking by comparing county-level statistics v.s. entire countries? Yes and yes.
But for the point I'm making it doesn't matter. The point is that there's a common misunderstanding, particularly among mainland Europeans, that the mere availability of guns in the US results in a drastic increase in the homicide rate.
This is simply not supported by the data. What the data does show is that if you're going to kill yourself or others you're likely to use the best tool for the task, whether that's a gun or a knife.
Does the ease of availability of guns in the US make it easier to kill people, and cause some murders that otherwise wouldn't have happened? Yeah, but it's hard to tease that out of the data, it also prevents some murders.
What we do see from the data[2] is that there's lots of countries with much more restrictive gun policies that have higher homicide rates than the US, and furthermore the occurrences of gun-related homicides in the US don't at all map to whether the area has more liberal access to guns, but whether there's a general crime & poverty problem there.
Lithuania has a significantly higher homicide rate than the US, 5.5 v.s. the US's 3.9, but just 1% of homicides there are gun crimes[3].
However I've never heard anyone say to my Lithuanian friends that they were lucky to get out because of the obscene murder rate there, but I've heard my fellow Europeans make comments like that to some of my American friends when it comes to gun crimes.
Pretty sure I'm not. The 0.58/100k figure for the Netherlands includes all gun deaths, too. Washington, NY, has a population of <64k people. Yet its gun homicide rate is still 58% higher than that of the Netherlands. And that's for a county that you picked to show that the situation in the US supposedly isn't as bad as I think.
The fact remains that the US have a gun homicide rate of 3.43/100k, compared to the Netherlands' 0.29/100k (12x), Germany's 0.07/100k (49x), France's 0.21/100k (16x), the UK's 0.06/100k (57x), or Spain's 0.15/100k (23x). That's an order of magnitude difference for all of these countries, with two major EU nations (they haven't left yet! :P) at about 50x fewer gun homicides than the US! Only three EU countries—Italy, Portugal, and Greece—have less than 10x fewer gun homicides, at 0.35, 0.42, and 0.53 per 100k, respectively, or in relative terms: 9.8x, 8x, 6.5x fewer. How is that not a "drastic increase"?
The gun homicide rate in Europe is drastically lower than in the US. That's non-debatable, the data shows it beyond any doubt. So is total homicide rate, albeit by a smaller margin, as per your link, with the US at 3.9, two to four times higher than most EU countries. Singling out Lithuania is misleading.
I'm not going to go into whether access to guns increases suicide rates due to opportunity, that's another discussion. Let's stick with the homicides here.
The "glad you got out of that hellhole" comments you note could be due to movies and TV shows. There is a lot of gun violence in US productions, it's not hard to see how that could create an association for people who haven't lived there.
This reply is correctly refuting an argument that I'm not making. If I was saying that the gun homicide rate anywhere in the EU & the US was comparable I'd be wrong, as you say it's off by orders of magnitude.
What I am saying is that comparing homicides by weapon type ignores the big picture, which is who cares in the end whether you're killed by a gun, a knife, or bludgeoned to death? You're going to be just as dead.
The availability of guns in the US means that when there's a homicide or a suicide it's vastly more likely to involve a gun than in the EU, but people focus on that statistic and assume that magically taking away the guns would drastically improve the situation.
That's not supported by the data. The people of Lithuania, which for some in the US would match some ideal they have of restrictive gun laws, manage to kill each other at a higher overall rate than pepole in the US, even though they have gun restrictions to the point where only 1% of those homicides involve a gun.
So yes, if you look at the US by firearm related death rate[1] alone it looks like a 3rd world hellhole. But comparing countries by death rate by specific implement makes no sense. Instead you have to look at the overall homicide rate[2] and the overall suicide rate[3].
Once you do that, several countries in Europe look worse when it comes to homicides, and the US is exceeded by the likes of France when it comes to overall suicide rates.
Again you single out Lithuania, completely ignoring that most European countries have a homicide rate that is 2–4x lower than that in the US. Let's just check a few: France 1.2, Germany 0.9, UK 0.9, Italy 0.8, Spain 0.7, Poland 0.7, Austria 0.5, Switzerland 0.5, Netherlands 0.7, Belgium 1.8, United States 3.9.
How do you look at this data and conclude "yup, the EU is just as bad as the US"? Instead you focus on the Baltic states and the Balkans, which is not what people commonly have in mind when you refer to Europe.
And no, we're still not talking about suicides. They are completely orthogonal to homicides. Stop injecting them into the discussion.
I'm not concluding that "the EU is just as bad as the US", and really, I can't see how you could possibly come to that conclusion after reading my comments.
Yes, on average pretty much any part of the EU is better when it comes to homicide statistics. All I've been pointing out that from looking at the homicide & gun death statistics in the US you can't conclude that guns are important variable driving those statistics.
> we're [..] not talking about suicides [...]
> Stop injecting them into the discussion.
You're the one who started injecting suicides into the discussion. In your earlier comment[1] you said, in response to a graph[2] I posted that included non-suicide numbers, which is the part I was citing, that the "lowest groups are 2-7". Those numbers include gun suicides, whereas I wasn't talking about that at all but the other data on the page which shows gun homicide statistics similar to the Dutch 0.58.
But since you muddied the water by bringing up these unrelated suicide numbers, I started to itemize the suicide & the non-suicide you were conflating them with, and now a few comments later you're complaining about my discussing something you brought up in the first place.
Man, I have to ask if you even read past the first sentence of my comment... Yes, I'm sure that the homicide rate of Rotterdam may be higher than some podunk midwestern town. What I said though, is that I feel safer living in Amsterdam over some of the US cities where I have also lived. Your statistics show that ALL of these cities(DC, Philly, NYC, SF, and LA) are objectively more dangerous to live in than Amsterdam.
I'm sure you are trying to dispel something you see as a common myth, but maybe you should try having a conversation instead of giving a sermon.
1. HEADLINE: Allow users to setup a caching drive in the standard installation process
Currently, the setup process for creating a caching drive(I have a 16gb SSD in addition to my HDD) is very convoluted, with lots of conflicting information about how to setup bcache. Even after finally getting it working, my computer will still hang occasionally when RAM is maxed out and the cache drive has to write to HDD
Yes, but these experiments serve at least three purposes.
One, to verify the Model (after all, if its predictions fail in some part it will have to be revised).
Another, to verify the characteristics of the predicted particles (there might be some differences from the prediction that are important, but not hypothesis-breaking).
Finally, however unlikely and yet most excitingly (to me at least), to open new avenues of questioning and hypothesis up by really throwing into question some things.
It's worth remembering that the Higgs particle was also predicted by the standard model, and no one underestimates the importance of that confirmation.
The Higgs is an elementary particle, so its discovery was much more exciting. There are a lot of particles made up of quarks, like the five mentioned in the article:
What is at least one single scientific (replicated) evidence that these tables does not contain merely a socially constructed crap, modern day alchemy deduced from flawed models and/or instruments?
These tables are editorialized by the Particle Data Group, they summarize and distill the empirical evidence of thousands of high-energy physics experiments. Not every experiment is replicated, but some are, hence the different ratings of how sure the editors are the particles exist.
From their website:
"In the 2014 Review, the listings include 3,283 new measurements from 899 papers, in addition to 32,000 measurements from 9,000 papers that appeared in earlier editions. Evaluations of these properties are abstracted in summary tables."
> probability, statistics, accelerators and detectors
Surely, there could not be any error here. Nothing socially constructed.
Isn't it already borders nonsense that in the universe which is sustained by a couple of fundamental conservation laws there supposed to be hundreds of elementary (presumably fundamental) particles which emerge and disintegrate in time, which is not even an intrinsic property of "more real" things like photons.
> Surely, there could not be any error here. Nothing socially constructed.
There could be. Physicists have been trying very hard for the last 40 years to find something the standard model cannot explain, without success. Some experimentalists are actually disappointed about this.
> Isn't it already borders nonsense that in the universe which is sustained by a couple of fundamental conservation laws there supposed to be hundreds of elementary (presumably fundamental) particles which emerge and disintegrate in time, which is not even an intrinsic property of "more real" things like photons.
You are confused. The standard model has 17 elementary particles (+ anti particles). There are a lot of composite particles, like the ones the article talks about. Not sure what you mean about decays, but photons are a special case, because they move at the speed of light. Other elementary particles, like the heavier quarks, can and do decay.
Given that science is done with models and instruments I am confused what answer you expect. Those models and instruments are validated in thousands of different experiments, at different energy and length scales, from astronomical observations to man-made particle accelerators. Each of the experiments and observations testing slightly different part of the theory, all of them mostly in agreement. It is the rare disagreements that are actually most exciting, because they pave the way forward to pieces of the theory we do not understand yet.
Here are two independent examples that agree in their results: experimental measurements at the LHC; theoretical predictions from QFT.
Why, there are way too many well-documented instances of socially constructed and socially accepted bullshit in the history of mankind. Actually, it is much difficult task to find instances of accurate approximations to the truth.
There has been times when Hegelian "logic" has been accepted, published by Oxford University press, peer-reviewed, highly praised and successfully taught to
students. I have read parts of Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. I have read it after The Principles of Mathematics and things like Haskell Prelude.
I have read peer-reviewed commentaries to The Highest Yoga Tantra and such crap like commentaries to Hatha Yoga Pradipika by some Australian lady with some funny Hindu nickname.
I have read even beautiful sufi texts in which they freely mix and match anthropomorphic qualities to produce a beautiful carpet of linguistic patterns which describe nothing that exist. Peer-reviewed and highly praised, of course.
Socially constructed nonsense is not something rare and uncommon. To the contrary, most of publicly available information is bullshit, or at least highly inaccurate, full of meaningless generalizations, flawed logic and amounts to nothing but mere compilation of current memes.
So, I am more or less familiar with how such things could emerge. My question is - what is a single falsifiable experiment which proves that this is not socially constructed, highly sophisticated sectarian set of beliefs supported by complex (but meaningless) simulations (instead of mere a book of dogma).
There is plenty of stuff in science that is imperfect and deeply flawed. Look at all the poorly reproduced studies on various nutrition and health products, for example. The Standard model is not part of that weak set.
The way to oppose social construction is increased rigor and experimentation. The Standard Model has some of the highest rigor and largest amount of experiments backing it.
Skimming through your comment history it's obvious you have a bone to pick with modern physics. Is there some discrete point in history where you think we started diverging from falsifiable experiments so we can perhaps compare before and after?
Not in the same way. There was no experimental evidence for the Higgs field before the Higgs was observed. These new particles arise naturally out of parts of the Standard Model that are already experimentally tested.
You're not wrong, but you'd have been really hard-pressed to find someone of significance who didn't already believe the Higgs mechanism was there. In the sense that mass exists, there was a high degree of expectation there too. It's actually quite amazing to have so many of these recent discoveries, also be confirmations. It's been over a century of this, starting with Relativity.
Professor Tim Gershon, Professor of Physics at University of Warwick and UK spokesperson for the LHCb experiment:
“After the LHCb experiment is upgraded in the next long shutdown of the LHC (during 2019-20), it will be able to move to the next stage in the search for new particles: namely, doubly heavy baryons. These states – which contain two charm quarks or two beauty quarks or one of each – have long been predicted, but never yet observed. Their discovery will help to address important unsolved questions about how hadrons are bound together by the strong interaction.”
So I would assume that yes they have been predicted and is opening the doors for further confirmations?
Please take more care in quoting. What you've quoted does not describe the current work, but rather something they haven't demonstrated yet called "doubly heavy baryons". That sentence was immediately preceded by this one:
Professor Tim Gershon, Professor of Physics at University of Warwick and UK spokesperson for the LHCb experiment, explained what will come next for the LHCb experiment: “After the LHCb experiment is upgraded in the next long shutdown of the LHC (during 2019-20), it will be able to move to the next stage in the search for new particles: namely, doubly heavy baryons.
> Their discovery will help to address important unsolved questions about how hadrons are bound together by the strong interaction.
If the particles were already predicted by the standard model, what kind of unsolved questions are to address here, besides validating the predictions of the standard model even further? (serious question)
The standard model provides a set of postulates that could be used for prediction of possible composite particles, their masses, and decay times.
However it is computationally infeasible to calculate them directly, without using various approximations. Physicists try to solve these problems numerically (see for example about the field called lattice QCD), but it is not always possible and leads to introducing various approximations that produce errors and other artifacts in the numerical predictions.
So the particles were allowed by the standard model, but we didn't know for sure their properties. So this provides way to verify already done numerical predictions (I don't really know were they be done for this exact particles or not) and give us data about exact properties of these particles.
One could possibly draw an analogy with (quantum) chemistry here.
I'm not sure about this particular one, but a general idea is that the properties you are measuring in a particle depends on a lot of virtual particles.
It has 9 Feynman diagrams. If you look at the top left diagram, there is an electron that enters from the bottom right corner, then it emits a photon that go out thought the top left corner, then the electron goes out through the top left corner.
The following two diagrams show the case were the electron emits a second (and third) photon and reabsorbs it, so the second (and third) photons are not visible for the experimenter, they are virtual photons. These additional photons are only important because the change slight the properties of the electron.
In the next three diagrams the photon is so strong that it can spontaneously split in another electron and a positron. It looks like a loop/circle, because positrons are like electrons traveling backward in time. They are virtual electrons, and again they are not visible in the lab, they are only important to make a tiny correction to the result of the experiment.
The other three diagrams have two virtual electrons, than makes even smaller corrections.
And in addition of the virtual electrons, there can be virtual muons and tauons. They are like electrons but with more mass. So the probability of having one of them is smaller, so the correction is smaller. In this case, I think that the correction is so small that it's impossible to measure it.
And you can have another virtual particles, like virtual quarks and virtual W, anything that has a charge. Moreover you can have virtual unknown particles (with charge) because nature doesn't care if we know the particle yet or not. But they are heavier, so the correction is negligible.
If you change the experiment, and for example make a electron collide with a positron, then the calculations are very similar, but there is more energy laying around, and the corrections from heavy particles are more important, so this variation is more useful to discover new particles.
Back to your question ...
The new particles are composed by three quarks, but actually they are composed by a lot of gluons and virtual quarks and antiquarks. To do any calculations you have to include a lot of diagrams like in the figure linked above, and a lot more, many many more.
IIRC the calculation is so complex that it's not possible to compare the experimental results with theoretical calculations. Perhaps they have some heuristic to compare the results with the results of similar particles.
This was probably part of a bigger experiment that produces a lot of particles, and they are trying to classify them in families. And perhaps in the classifications they can spot some strange pattern that may provide a hit that there is a new elementary particle.
Because a prediction is just an assumption (theory), and it can become a house of cards when basing future science on that assumption. Observation is proof, so future science can use that proof without worry.
You start with a hypothesis with no assumption of truth.
Using that hypothesis you make a prediction and then use observation to test your prediction.
During your observation you may find proof that your prediction was correct, which in turn provides support for your hypothesis.
Once sufficient evidence is found for a hypothesis, it becomes a theory.
I'd say you have a theory from which you deduce a model that consists of various assumptions plus a hypothesis. If this hypothesis has not yet been compared to a set of observations, then it is also a prediction about that set of observations.
Also, the distinction between assumption and hypothesis is subjective, it depends what aspect of the phenomenon you care about at that time. Another term for assumption could be "auxiliary hypothesis".
Proof refers to the set of logical deductions (from theory + assumptions) that lead to the model, it has nothing to do with the observations.
It's important not to confuse theory with scientific theory. They have very different meanings. In everyday speech a theory is roughly equivalent to a guess. In science, a theory is a well tested explanation of some phenomenon.
It's always hypothesis then theory. Your hypothesis may be based on other theories, but it is itself not a theory.
From Wikipedia: "The scientific method involves the proposal and testing of hypotheses, by deriving predictions from the hypotheses about the results of future experiments, then performing those experiments to see whether the predictions are valid. This provides evidence either for or against the hypothesis. When enough experimental results have been gathered in a particular area of inquiry, scientists may propose an explanatory framework that accounts for as many of these as possible. This explanation is also tested, and if it fulfills the necessary criteria (see above), then the explanation becomes a theory. This can take many years, as it can be difficult or complicated to gather sufficient evidence."
Math tells me there must be 216, no? 3 quarks make a baryon, there are 6 types of quarks, so 6^3?
Idk if up up up baryons are allowed though, or any other baryon made of 3 equal quarks.
You can also have excited particles that have the same quark content. They are called "resonances", are unstable and can decay. For example, the five particles discovered here are excitations of the particle containing two strange and one charm quark.
AFAIK, the experimentally determined rest masses of these excited states/particles (same thing, different was of looking at it) agree with the calculated ones well. So yes, they were predicted. No surprises sadly; of course it's still a huge achievement!
yes, and note that these are not fundamental particles (like the Higgs was for example), but composite particles of yet another combination of the fundamental quarks. The SM predicts the existence of hundreds (thousands?) of these.
Actually it is even a one new particle (Omega_c baryon), but they observed five different excited energy states of it (like observing different excited states of a Hydrogen atom), so called resonances [1]. But the discovery is still exciting because it should have been really hard to find something that we don't really know how looks like in such large amount of noise.
The problem is that it is hard for us to predict masses/energies of new composite particles because although Standard Model provides hypothetical way to do it, it is infeasible computationally.
>"it should have been really hard to find something that we don't really know how looks like in such large amount of noise."
But if there are thousands of different such "surprising-to find-particles" to possibly detect, is it actually surprising to observe one of them?
Edit:
Also, from the top answer at your link: "The first generation of elementary particles are by observation not composite and therefore not seen to decay...The Standard Model of elementary particles, with the three generations of matter, gauge bosons in the fourth column and the Higgs boson in the fifth."
From wikipedia: "In the Standard Model, the Higgs particle is a boson with no spin, electric charge, or colour charge. It is also very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson
> But if there are thousands of different such "surprising-to find-particles" to possibly detect, is it actually surprising to observe one of them?
It is hard to correctly identify what exactly particles from those possible thousands are observed in given data. The are two main problems: the properties of those not yet observed particles are not well known (because it is computationally hard to predict them from the standard model) and because the number of useful events is much much smaller than the number of events that correspond to already known events.
> So do elementary particles decay or not?
I don't see a contradiction here: the first generation of elementary particles does not decay (or has not been observed to decay yet), Higgs boson is not from then because the author of the answer are talking about the first generation of fermions and Higgs boson is not one of them.
Yes. They're baryons (three-quark states). This is analogous to the discovery/synthesis of new isotopes in the middle of the last century. Technically they were "predicted", but it's still important to take the measurements. Occasionally there are surprises.
